


The Abyss

by Kuebikonism



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Angst, Child Abuse, Guilt, Introspection, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Hatred, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Thoughts, the absolute fucking mess that is xander’s psyche after the wonderful parenting of garon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:41:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23393428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kuebikonism/pseuds/Kuebikonism
Summary: It sucks being the oldest child. It especially sucks when there were once precisely fifty-seven of you, and now there are four.Sometimes, Xander stares into the abyss to try and see god. What he finds there is worse than the answer to all his problems.
Kudos: 14





	The Abyss

**Author's Note:**

> darker than canon.
> 
> garon fucks around.

If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you, or so he’s been told. 

A wise man had thought of that. He had taken three days to think of it before announcing it out loud, like a real poet, Leo tells him excitedly. Wise man, dead man, Xander tries and fails to see the difference. They are not him, and they are not Father.

Xander doesn’t consider himself the type of man to waste his days pondering quotes from dead men. The life of a prince is one of responsibility, of pure, unfiltered loyalty towards the preservation of... this. The kingdom. The hierarchy. The bloodline. 

Anything else is nil. 

Father’s teachings slipping out again, he thinks to himself, a touch of dryness in his throat. There is no escaping the responsibility of an heir. 

He clutches a hand over his stomach, ignoring the stab of agony that sets his body aflame; as if he’d just been punched, not three hours earlier as it had been. Three... no, four. Three? Has it already been three hours? 

The sun is long gone, and the looming gaze of the moon is the only lifelike presence in the desolate courtyard of Nohr’s royal palace. Father’s garden was so beautiful in his youth, but as Xander lifts his weary gaze, arm still around his aching midsection, all he can see is gray. Disgusting.

There had been a time when he’d thought the seas of multicolored flowers, each petal more vibrant and lively than the last, would never die out. He would run across the ancient stone pathways through rows and rows of white-painted arches, towards the shade of the great oak where his mother would be lying in wait. She would weave flowers into his hair as he babbled and laughed like the child he was, frozen in some sick memory of an innocence he selfishly assumed would last forever. What an absolute idiot he’d been to believe in something like that.

They’re dead and gone, Xander thinks, a shudder passing through his aching body. 

He’s the crown prince, the heir to a dynasty of greatness that has passed its crown down a delicate line of blood, the same royal blood that flows through the veins of his own body. He can see it pulsing dry and blue through his wrists when the sun looms over the horizon and Father finally allows him to drop to the floor, drenched in sweat and exhaustion, tearing at his metal gauntlets like a dog at a collar. He can see it on Father’s robes after those particularly agonizing days of his youth, the sin of wrath and greed laced with the blood of his betrothed.

He can see it in his dreams, soaking the faceless remains of the brothers and sisters he never knew, Father’s voice, cruel and unfamiliar, roaring in his chest and in his head, heart racing at a thousand miles a second, his small, trembling hands clutching at a too-large sword, those who begged and cried, and worse, those who closed their eyes and waited-

God, he can see the abyss. Father’s eyes bore into him like two particularly sharp knives on _good_ days, and on the rare occasion he gathers the courage to meet them face to face, he can only see the blackness and wretchedness buried deep within the sockets. 

Sockets. Arm sockets? He’s dislocated his shoulder a few times. The burden of a trained swordsman, Father tells him, but the sword is not what broke him. He raises his sword at Father’s command, because Father is just, and then he isn’t and Xander’s mind spins and he’s being shoved into the ground, Father’s hands clasped around his throat, watching the royal blood of his ancestors spilling out into a little red puddle on the floor.

It hurts him to say it, but sometimes he thinks of the man Father used to be. Before he was Father. Before he was just Father, with a face and a smile and those eyes that held some form of humanity behind them.

He forgets those thoughts as soon as the back of Father’s hand, rough from years of swordsmanship, slams into the side of his battered face.

What an absolute joke of a prince he is, Xander thinks bitterly. 

The candles on the walls illuminate the path before him with their orange flames, and he wonders if it shows. 

It’s days like that when he sees it, where he drags himself back to his bedchambers far past even the servants’ curfews, rubbing salve into his cuts and bruises and washing off blood that can’t precisely be identified as his own. 

The eyes in the mirror travel slowly upwards, past the splotches of darkening purple dotting his torso, past the split lip and the bloodied cheek, towards something he doesn’t particularly want to see.

Two blank, hollowed eyes stare back at him.

It’s moments like these when he sees Father’s callous face staring at him through the glass. 

Xander‘s jolted back to reality by another stab of pain, this time in his right leg. He’s fallen to the ground at some point, half-propped against the wall, a lone arm left to support him. By some stroke of luck, his left side has been left near unharmed, allowing him to press the whole of his weight against the cool stone to prop himself into a standing position. Xander can’t help but scoff; he’s been beaten half to death and he considers it lucky? 

Dryly, he wonders if his dead siblings would resent him for even complaining about his treatment. In comparison, he’s been treated like a god. 

But for Camilla, for Leo, for _Elise_ , he’ll take every hit he can. When three centuries of royal blood finds itself on the knuckles of its penultimate ruler, he’ll make sure it’s his and _his alone._

Never again.

Never again will any of his siblings shed blood in the halls of Castle Krakenberg.

__

_Don’t be like Father. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Xander._

Everything hurts sometimes.

When he tries to protect them, when he tries not to be Father, when he tries to stand up for _something_ important in his goddamn life, like the noble prince, the future king he was raised to be-

Nil.

He is nothing. He is worth exactly as much as the scars on his body, branded deep into the depths of his conscience and corrupting the senseless being beneath.

Sometimes, he realizes that there is no god. No one but he and Father exists in their little void, covered in flowers and shitty gold and thousands of thousands of stars, surrounded by nothing to touch, nothing to hurt. 

When he tries to smile, the corners of his mouth ache. He’s forgotten them already. Who were they? Their names fall off his tongue like droplets, disappearing in the great pool of blackness below. 

When he looks down, all he can see is the endless night sky stretching beneath him, each star glimmering just as brightly as the one beside it.

He is Sirius, and he is nothing. Shining deeply into a world that seems emptier the longer he stares into it.

Brightly.

Brightly.

...

too brightly.

**Author's Note:**

> I never really liked how Fates characterized the Nohrian siblings, especially Xander. This fic is actually a revised version of something I wrote maybe ~two years ago, because sometimes I write shit and forget about it till corona drags it out from the dust...


End file.
